


count the years (in breaking)

by screamlet



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Thorin Lives, Dialogue Heavy, F/M, Female Bilbo, Female Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield, Female Protagonist, Five Years Later, Grief/Mourning, Inner Dialogue, POV Female Character, Post-Battle of Five Armies, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 08:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Wait for me!”<br/>Tauriel smiles to herself. “Haven’t I done enough of that?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	count the years (in breaking)

“Wait for me!”

Tauriel smiles to herself. “Haven’t I done enough of that?”

Kíli falls into step next to her. “You know I hate sprinting. You know I can’t sprint. Sprinting, it’s not our thing.”

“I wasn’t sprinting.”

“It seemed like it.”

“ _Seeming to do_ and _doing_ aren’t quite the same.” She glances to her side and smirks to herself. 

“I wish you could see me when I’m looking for you in the mountain,” Kíli says. “Of course, if you could, then I wouldn’t be looking for you.”

“Is this the story where you run around the corridors, yelling for _Captain Tauriel_ to anyone and everyone who can listen?”

“Have I told you that one already?” he asks. “You took the ending of my story. I was going to do impressions and everything.”

“Oh, _impressions_ , well, don’t let me stop you.”

“The moment’s gone,” he says. “My Bofur is getting much better.”

“It’s getting worse.”

“He gets upset, though. Surely that’s a marker of my deadly accurate aim.”

“Mmm, no. That means it’s bad enough that the kindest person in your entire mountain city has begun to yell at you.”

“I won’t accept this. I’ll just have to try harder.”

“I’ll have to accept losing you to suffocation-by-hat. Or piccolo. Do you think he would use the piccolo?”

“Of his flutes, yes, he would absolutely use the piccolo to kill a prince of the city. The others he can’t bear to part with, but the piccolo?”

“It would fit so easily in your throat.”

“Tell me more what you think of my throat.” He motions to where they are, the lands around Erebor that can no longer be called a desolation—more like _aspiring wasteland_ , and perhaps they’ll aspire all the way to moorland one day. “There’s no one around. You can talk to the prince however you like.”

“Or,” Tauriel says, “I could do what His Majesty Your Uncle requires of me.”

“You’re doing that,” Kíli says. “You haven’t stopped scouting for a single moment to appreciate the majestic beauty of this dwarf by your side. He’s always saying you need to take more time for you.”

“I will wager the little I own that he has never said that.”

“Well,” Kíli says. “Maybe not with actual words made up of symbols and sounds, but he’s grunted something to that effect many a time. My uncle and I can agree that you need to take more time for yourself. No scouting, no meetings, no negotiating with Bard and the little Bardlings—Tauriel time, plain and simple.”

She kneels to the ground to examine tracks, new ones. After several moments, she says, “Go back to the mountain. These are new.”

And he goes.

*

“I hardly feel the cold,” Kíli says.

“You’ve said that too many times for it to be true,” Tauriel replies.

“Truth by repetition,” Kíli says. “That's real, isn't it?”

She shakes her head and sits up against the mountain rock behind her. They’re on the landing by the secret door, one of the first things Thorin ordered remade when they took back Erebor. They shouldn’t be there, but it’s high enough that she can see more stars than if she were lower among the ever-lit lights that surround the main gate. In any case, the guards won’t find Tauriel and if they do, they won’t disturb her. 

“My mother wants to know how old you are,” Kíli says. “After all this time, she still thinks of me as her swaddled dwarrow.”

“And I the pointed-eared wolf come to take you away,” Tauriel laughs. “I like that. I like it very much.”

“Says you from the top of _our_ city.”

She laughs again and looks down at the trees and land around the base of the mountain, watching for movement or anything suspicious before she lifts her eyes back to the sky. 

“I’m not very old, all things considered,” Tauriel tells him. “I’ve yet to see a breaking of the world.”

“What do you call all this?” Kíli asks. He motions to the scars in the rock behind them, remnants of what Smaug crumbled and crushed, and what dwarves re-carved into the stone.

“This?” she asks. “This isn’t the world. This is one mountain on a continent with thousands.”

“A history lesson _and_ a geography one? Tell me more, you who are ancient and wise, yet far more luminous than any elder who has so weathered the world.”

He teases her, but it’s sweet and underneath it all, genuinely curious. He gathers all he can, the more to form a picture of her using all her uneven, misshaped parts. 

“Elves are tied to this world,” she says. “We seem immortal to those who die, but we will die, too, when the world breaks for the last time. Until then, we count the years in breaking.”

“What’s breaking?”

“Breaking, literally breaking,” Tauriel laughs. “Elves, especially the ones in the west, start so many wars and conquer so many of each other’s kingdoms over so many stupid things that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. So we count a new age for every time the world is broken, and we wait now for the third break. When that happens, we’ll call this time right now the third age—then we’ll begin a new one.” She smiles and says, “I was born in this age. I’m not very old.”

“And by broken you mean…”

“You lived in Ered Luin, didn’t you? The Blue Mountains. There used to be a thousand miles of land to the west of that, an entire continent called Beleriand. There was a war, a huge war against a dark lord, and with his defeat the whole land crumbled into the sea. That was the first break. The second was an island shaped like a star that sat in the western sea, and that sank into the sea as well.”

“I don’t think I like the sea,” Kíli says. “It has no right devouring land like that.”

“Before that,” Tauriel continues, “You could reach the Undying Lands by boat, any boat, and they were right there, but only for elves. Then that island sank, there was another war, and our gods broke the world again so that only elves could ever reach them. Anyone else who sails a ship into the west simply goes around the world and ends up at the east again.”

“All right, but,” Kíli says, “You’re telling me that you think the world is flat.”

“Kíli.”

“Of course you _go around_ back to the east—”

“Not if you’re an elf.”

“It isn’t a—it’s not a _debate_ , the world is round, we have a sun—”

“Don’t ask about the sun,” Tauriel says. “Or the moon. Long story.”

“All right, let’s enjoy the stars in peace and not think about how you don’t believe in sundials.”

“ _Kíli_.”

“You need to write to that Woodland Realm of yours and get a map because I, for one, would like to see what this broken and re-broken world of yours looks like.” 

“Maybe,” she replies.

“You should tell Fíli all this—Uncle, too. They’d _love_ to hear what the elves are teaching their children these days.” Kíli is quiet for a moment and then asks, “And what’s _beneath_ the earth if it’s just this _plate_ with a sea on the east and an Elves Only Island Death Resort to the west? If we keep mining, do we hit more sky? All the mithril we could ever want? Maybe—”

“You’re ruining the stars for me,” Tauriel says. “Shut up, would you?”

And he does.

*

“Uncle worries about you, you know,” Kíli says.

“He shouldn’t,” she replies.

“Hmm,” Kíli says. “I thought we would spend more time arguing about how you doubt this and doubt that and never believe a word I say.”

“Your uncle still doesn’t like elves very much,” Tauriel says. “Of course he worries that the captain of his outer guard is the former captain of the king who imprisoned him.”

“For about eight hours,” Kíli says. “I was never worried.”

“You never worry,” she says. “It’s what I like about you. I’ve even known elves to worry, but you don’t worry. You always…”

Today she’s making the trip to Lake-town to meet with Bard’s guard captain and discuss the influx of activity in Dale. It’s part of a larger plan between Erebor and Lake-town to decide once and for all what they should do about Dale. It still isn’t a town, but adventurous merchants cleared some of the larger avenues of rubble and began to hold weekend markets there for the residents of Erebor. Five years since Erebor was taken back—five years since the battle on its slopes and on the ground around it—and the two cities must decide whether to level Dale and begin again, or—

“Uncle worries about you.” Kíli says.

“You said that already,” she replies.

“He worries that I’m not enough to keep you here.”

“And here I thought he worried that I’d stay.”

“Well, you were wrong. Old as you are, wise as you are, you were wrong. How does that feel?” Tauriel doesn’t answer, so Kíli continues. “I told you his story, didn’t I?”

“You haven’t told me nearly enough stories for the time I spend out here defending your city,” Tauriel replies. 

“That got me,” she imagines him pointing to his chest. “Right here.”

“What should I know about your uncle?”

“Well,” Kíli says, “He broods less than you imagine, but broods a great deal more than everyone else. Except you, possibly. You’ve become very broody.”

“I prefer _contemplative_.”

“We’d all prefer lots of things,” Kíli remarks. “He knows, though. If you think you’re the first to lose something and take to the mountains to make yourself whole, well. You’re not. You’ve told me how old these mountains are. Do you think—”

They’re closer to Dale now. “Would people, Thorin and Bard and the others, really want to keep Dale as it is?” Tauriel asks. “An empty city reminding them all of what was lost, serving no purpose except black market commerce and giving enemies a city full of spaces to build their strength?”

“Well that won’t happen, not with our captain of the outer guard to watch us.”

“I can only do so much,” Tauriel mutters. 

“You should ask for more help, then!” Kíli says. “You shouldn’t think of all the dwarves as miners who hate the light of the sun—we’re not orcs or goblins, we’re _dwarves_.”

“I don’t think that.”

“You do a little bit.”

“I don’t, not even a little.”

“Then why don’t you ask for help?”

“I don’t need it, Kíli,” she says, in a tone sharper than she means. 

He leaves her alone while she walks on.

*

The King and his “burglar queen” (as Dwalin was quick to call her) have afforded her a suite of rooms in the mountain. The peaks and slopes of the Lonely Mountain itself are too difficult to build on and she doesn’t want a dwelling on the ground level. This will do.

Tauriel visits her rooms to bathe and for a change of clothes before she returns to her duties and Bilbo, proving the efficacy of the inner guard, appears at her door within moments. Bilbo insists on embracing her whenever they meet as though it’s been an age since they last met, but Tauriel doesn’t refuse her. Tauriel looks briefly to the thick bound book that's appeared on her table, though Bilbo shows no sign that she's the one who put it there just a moment ago.

“Ori has some concern,” Bilbo informs her. “The packet letters from the Woodland Realm are getting thicker and, I bet if I read them, more desperate.”

“They are from Legolas,” Tauriel says. “I don’t think he would know _desperate_ until it stood in front of him, face-to-face.”

Bilbo laughs and says, “No, he wouldn’t—but that’s desperation, isn’t it?” 

She says nothing, so Bilbo says, “I’m concerned that the next missive will be an army demanding to know what we’ve done with you, unless you reassure them you’re all right.”

“The packets are growing thicker because Legolas has likely stuffed them with leaves to remind me what they look like,” Tauriel says.

“Is that it? Have you checked?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” she replies. “That’s his sense of humor, and he loathes writing.”

“Perhaps it’s Thranduil.”

Tauriel chokes out a laugh and realizes there are tears in her eyes, sprung without warning. She laughs and looks back at Bilbo to show her she’s smiling. 

“I’d like to see the army they would muster to come visit me,” Tauriel replies. “Legolas would probably drag a dead spider behind their train to remind me of the good times we had murdering them.”

“You strange thing,” Bilbo says, so fond of her. “Make your way to our table tonight, would you? Elbow Dwalin out of the way—he’s completely terrified of you.”

She raises her eyebrows and Bilbo nods earnestly. “It’s true; if he can’t see the top of your head from where he stands, he’ll never trust you.”

She laughs and has nothing more to say. Bilbo demands, pries, forces truth and favors from everyone in the mountain, but not from her. Why not? Why doesn’t she? Why doesn’t she take Tauriel’s hand and demand an explanation for why she stays outside, why she never attends any public events, why she avoids their company?

Instead, Bilbo says, “Think about joining us.” She adds, “It helps. You already come to councils. Come to a meal with us. Then to two in a day. It could be any two meals, really. I’m always eating and if I’m not, come find me and we’ll eat. Then to tea—I promise, it’s not just tea.” Bilbo grins at her and says, “The others wouldn’t stand it if it was _just tea_.”

Tauriel nods, but Bilbo doesn’t leave. 

“I’ll consider it,” Tauriel says.

“Think about it,” Bilbo says. 

She bathes and dresses, then finds her way to the markets in one of the larger halls where she buys herself a rich bowl of stew that will keep her until tonight. It’s a market in a mountain, a place for the now-huge number of dwarves living in city who aren’t invited to meals with the King and Queen and their Company.

Kíli falls into a chair next to her. “Don’t mind the black flags outside,” he says.

“Black flags?” she asks. “I didn’t notice them this morning.”

“Well, no, they’ve only just put them up,” he says. He looks at her stew and says, “You didn’t get bread with that?”

“I forgot,” she admits. 

“Go get bread. Stew without bread, what’s the point?” He sighs and says, “ _Elves_.”

“We have _stew_ but we don’t call it that, because _stew_ sounds revolting.”

“It sounds like comfort and home,” Kíli replies. “Comfort and home in one sound and you can make it anywhere you go. _Stew_. It’s a good word. You like it.”

“I’ll admit to nothing.” 

“Go get bread!”

“Tell me about the flags,” she says.

“Do you not remember?” he asks, a little shocked, then he shakes his head. “You remember. Five years today. Since the battle for the mountain.”

“Today?” she asks. “I knew that.”

“You forgot.”

Tauriel scoops out a potato from her bowl and drops it on the wooden table. “Think of my memory as this chunk of soggy potato.”

“Why,” Kíli groans.

“Actually, think of it as memory in general,” she replies. “Now the memory of men and hobbits—they don’t live very long, and so everything they ever learn and know is within this block of potato and then they die and that’s the end of it.”

“This is cheerful lunch conversation,” Kíli remarks. “I wonder that I’m not hungry. Or that people aren’t staring more.”

“Now the memory of dwarves, if I recall correctly,” Tauriel says, “Is just a little longer.” With her thumb, she squashes the potato slightly so the base spreads out slightly. “You live longer, remember more, but in less detail than the potato of hobbits and men.”

“You’ve ruined potatoes for yourself, by the way,” Kíli says. “I may not know much, but I know you’ll never look at a potato the same way again.”

“Now my memory, the memory of elves, is more like this.” She squashes the potato even more and smoothes its potato-ness out so it’s only a thin whitish spread on the table. “I can remember further back in some detail, but five years ago today?” She points with her fingertip at the edge of her potato mess. “This grain of salt here in the blur near the end.”

“It’s not the end,” Kíli says.

“I know,” she replies. “I’m going to need more potato.” She can almost see him smile at that, but she says, “We don’t get more, though, do we? This tiny bit here at the end will have to be spread out for another thousand years, and this stew and this market will be so far away that it will have never happened.” She gets up from the table to get the bread she forgot, and wipes the potato away with its wrapping paper. 

*

She finds it’s harder to hide at night than during the day.

For all that she’s tried, she can’t force herself to become nocturnal after thousands of years of rising with the sun and working herself exhausted into the night. She stays awake outside the mountain, ostensibly working long into the night, but she can’t help it—the moment she sees the nightwatchmen take their place at the mountain’s front, she can barely keep herself upright. She knows better than to fight sleep and returns to the mountain with brief nods to them all. She avoids the Queens’ Hall and goes directly to her rooms where she closes herself in for the night.

When she’s undressed and in bed, the lights out, the mountain quiet around her—she can’t hide. Her senses reach out and seek anything that can feed her starving mind. She curls up on her side and listens for anything that can keep her company in the dark. She tries to build a story of the sounds around her, the faint and strange noises of a mountain city at night, but it isn’t enough. The walls of her rooms are too solid and thick, they have no _give_ , and the heat of her sheets and quilts drags her down into restless sleep. 

She dreams herself into stories. She’s a captain in Gondolin, one of the last of the High Elves in the world. She is still Tauriel, perhaps, but as a High Elf she would have a mother name, a father name, more titles and names that fit into verses that will travel across the ages of the world. She clings to a sharp hold in the rock at her side and looks down the sheer face of the mountains that hide Gondolin from the world. In her dreams she doesn’t save the city; she turns on the ball of her foot, sword at the ready. She falls fighting, she wakes gasping.

She’s older, an elf born in the Undying Lands, a princess like the Lady of Lorien who followed her doomed brothers across a mythical bridge of solid ice that connected those lands and Beleriand. Tauriel has looked on the Lady Galadriel a handful of times, when Thranduil sent Legolas to Lorien and she as part of Legolas’s guard. There was a light in that woman not of their world and if Tauriel had woken into the world earlier, she could have had that light. She could have made her sure-footed way from kingdom to kingdom, commanded a realm of her own, sent legions of elves forth in her name. She would pace in her hall and demand to know troop movements, numbers, strategies, what more could they do, _what more_. 

She dreams herself back in Thranduil’s halls, but before her time, in the last age when outsiders still came. She imagines the gleaming metal of an army arriving at the throne. They’ve come to seek Thranduil and his father, and all the elves they could spare for a Last Alliance, a last stand for the elves of the world. They would unite into one people for this final fight. The last High King of the Elves would be there and she would be first to pledge her every arrow and blade to bring down the dark tower in the south. 

In her dreams, she doesn’t always win her battles, but she fights them. 

She is never slain in her dreams, but sometimes she—

She imagines a bright schoolroom, the one she remembers attending when she was young. She imagines children bent over their harps and flutes. She sees a girl (sometimes with golden hair, sometimes not) pluck at her harp, slowly sounding out the name _Tau-ri-el_ with every note. 

Tauriel wakes shivering in bed, her hair stuck to her neck with sweat, her feet as cold as the mountain rock around her. She falls back into sleep—lighter this time, her thoughts gliding on the surface of her dreams so she can leave them when the morning comes.

*

(Sometimes she dreams of her battle, the one there _are_ songs about, the ones that will enter into the books of elves, dwarves, and men alike. She knows better, though, than to stay there. 

(She shakes herself free of that place, lights her room again, and reads one of the books Bilbo leaves in her room. They’re folktales, mostly, of Bilbo’s people. Wry, amusing stories where no one bleeds and everyone heads to the “pub” for a “pint” after the nuisance of a battle. Stories so unlike the ones that made her that Tauriel has no choice but to put the light out again and sleep with a hand on that book so it keeps her from the places she knows.) 

*

Tauriel pretends to forget about the queen’s offer. Instead, the next night, she roams to the south again to Lake-town, walking along the edges of the town by the water. She puts on her captain’s scowl ( _I’m looking out for you don’t bother me don’t pay attention to me_ ) and walks to clear her mind. 

The dwarves she has lived and worked with these years show a pride for never forgiving or forgetting. Elves are stubborn too, she thinks. It’s easier for elves to forget slights and details when their memory was stretched so thin across the ages, but this is a different stubbornness, the one that brought her to leave the Woodland Realm, the only home she had ever known, for the wider world. For a mountain in the east. 

She had never imagined leaving the woods she knew so well until she was already gone. 

How could she possibly return?

“There you are,” Kíli heaves as he joins her. “I would have never found you except for your hair. If you really wanted to hide, you should put a hood on.”

“The hood you gave me isn’t subtle,” she replies. 

“Ah, Mother’s doing,” Kíli replies. “Color of our house. Metaphorical, house-of-our-fathers house not our literal house. I turn it inside out for traveling and my stealthier assignments.” He’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Your hair, though. I saw it when you stepped between houses and the moonlight caught your hair, like leaves in autumn.”

“It’s not that bright,” she replies. “All of your odes are to my hair and to the trees when you’ve only seen five trees in your life.”

“Not true,” he protests. “Look at all the trees the Burglar Queen had planted around the base of the mountain and how well they’re going through the seasons. And I’ll have you know, my captain, that I’m a dwarf of the world.”

“Is that so.”

“Don’t think I don’t hear that undertone,” he says. “I’ve seen much more of this Middle Earth than you give me credit for.”

“Kíli,” she says, and she finds her voice breaking. “Kíli, where should I go?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be so cheery and light for one moment, please, I’m asking where I should go.”

“You’re not happy here.”

“I’m not happy _anywhere_ , but I can’t stay here.” Her steps speed up and she takes the long winding path around Lake-town to find the road back to Erebor, the gate that is always open for her, no matter the hour. 

He even sounds out of breath, as if he’s keeping up with her, as though he can match her pace for pace. “I thought coming here would be different,” she says, but she shakes her head. “No, I didn’t think that—I didn’t think at all about leaving. I left and discovered there good reasons to leave, and now I am finished and there are no good reasons to stay. This was never—”

“Tell me,” he says.

She walks faster. She thinks she feels a chill, one that creeps at her neck so briefly before she wakes with the cold and the damp, a chill that she thinks the trees of her home would never let her feel. She thought that was because of all the blankets they gave her, animal pelts and woven fabrics lying on top of her for hours every night before she woke up with a start, but she’s here and she feels it still. 

“I forgot how to be alone,” she says. “And I must learn again.”

“You’re not alone.”

“You thought the world of me,” she says. She hears herself say the words and she feels the breeze carry them away where no one else can hear, because no one else is there with her. “And now you think nothing at all.”

“Well,” Kíli says. “You have me there.”


End file.
